The Mosaic
Apr 7, 2006 4:39:25 GMT
Post by barnibusquentin on Apr 7, 2006 4:39:25 GMT
Hey guys, if anyone's been wondering where I've been lately, I've been super busy with end of the year stuff, and mainly with a story. I figured to lend credence to my excuse I oughta post it. I'm not too sure how I feel about it. I kind of like it, but then again I think I could have done better. But here it is for your reading pleasure. Comments are welcome.
Ok formatting's a little wierd, but it should be readable.
There had been a tic in her mind since the moment Miranda took the case. It was like having an itch in a place she couldn’t scratch and, over the past week, it had started to whisper to her. It became a voice that was getting hard to ignore.
She cracked another can of Red Bull and leaned against the porch wall. It was as if she was drinking sand. The voice inside her wanted wine, but she wasn’t listening. Instead, she was thinking about how much she wanted to go home, and the bitter wind that poked at her like a coroner at a body.
The scything moon cast speckles of white light on the rural house. Miranda sighed and shifted her weight off the small flask in her back pocket. This porch was becoming home. Half way through her Red Bull she lit a Marlboro—the kind her father used to smoke—and took a heavy drag. So much for not smoking any more. Up until last night, she hadn’t had a cigarette since Morgan was born—and that was nine years ago. But what did it matter? This wasn’t the first time work or troubles with James had driven her back into the arms of a bad habit.
A dark-skinned officer with a crew cut, Mark, came up and leaned against the wall beside her.
“Vacuum guys just left. Basement still reeks but at least it’s dry. When Chris gets here we can go down and take a look,” he said.
Miranda snuffed out her smoke in the Red Bull can and squeezed her temples. Coffee stopped working last night, so she switched to energy drinks and her body was beginning to hate her.
“I don’t think there’s anything left to find. But, I’ll come down,” she said.
Mark began into the house; he turned back.
“Miranda, you look like shit. You going to be ok?”
She nodded and he walked away. Fuck him and his bullshit concern. As if she didn’t have enough stress. It was bad being on the same case as Mark, but she would rather burn off her toes than be alone with him. Once they looked through the basement she could go home and start wrapping this case up—maybe that voice would leave her alone. Had she known Mark was going to be there she never would have taken this case:
“Miranda, it’s Broderick. I can’t get a hold of Simon, there’s a quintuple homicide out near Franklin’s Cross. Do you know where he is?”
She started driving over.
“I’ll take it.”
“No, I need one of the seniors on this one.”
Luckily, Broderick had a weakness for women and Miranda seduced him into giving her the case. By the time she got there the police and forensics crew had already secured the area and started tagging evidence.
How out of place it all seemed: a lonely rural house lit by the stabbing blues and reds of police cars, the forensics team prodding through the lives of the dead. She felt like an invader.
Miranda dropped her empty into the garbage can and went inside. Most of the smell was gone, though faint fingers of the odour of death and wine lingered around the house. It was a metallic taste that provoked the itch in her throat. Though initially choking, the smell had become habitually appealing.
Cleaned up, the house reminded her of her neighbour Martin’s from when she was a kid—a memory of his warm hands and the sweet things he whispered shivered through her. Two weeks ago, the floor was strewn with fragments of glass—green and stained red like a parody of Christmas. The walls were spattered with wide patches of wine and blood. The furniture was as torn as the corpses. Most of this was cleaned up as forensics was done with it, but no one wanted to touch the walls. A shudder ripped up her spine. The whole crime scene still made her stomach jump.
Miranda stepped over the fractured tiles where, after slicing a woman named Jackie Harrison to fleshy ribbons with a broken bottle, Thomas McCormick had brought the refrigerator down on himself.
Again, Miranda wondered why glass? There was a block of knives within arms reach of the fridge and a loaded Remington in the closet.
Broderick insisted it was because the victims were all on PCP or LSD or something.
“People just don’t go nuts like that when they’re drunk,” he said.
Miranda scratched her throat; she didn’t believe him.
Chris came into the kitchen behind her and sputtered.
“Oh god, Miranda, I thought you and Mark would be downstairs.”
She didn’t reply.
“Doesn’t this place remind you of Slaughter House Five?”
“Never seen it,” Miranda muttered. “Reminds me of my old neighbour’s.”
Then Chris noticed her face.
“Jesus Christ, how long have you been here?”
She thought for a second.
“Since yesterday morning.”
“You look dead, you should really go home.”
Miranda nodded, not until she had seen this thing through. The voice wouldn’t let her.
She went into the bathroom and looked in the fragmented mirror. Her throat was raw from scratching and there were bags under her eyes so thick it looked like James had decked her. He might as well have, she was still angry with him:
On the first night of the case, it was nearly dawn when Miranda’s 4Runner pulled into the driveway. The front door was hanging half open. A shock tore through her. Had someone broken in? When she saw James’s shoes kicked into the rose garden her anger rose like the hammer on a pistol. She stamped inside and slammed the door. Her husband groaned and blundered in from the living room rubbing his head.
“I didn’t know you were working late. I didn’t want to wake you so I slept down here,” he said.
“How late were you out?”
James looked down like a berated teenager.
“You irresponsible prick. You left the kids alone. I can’t...” She groped for words but found none. Their kids weren’t even ten yet. As if their marriage didn’t have enough problems.
Miranda splashed some water on her face and—not finding a towel—rubbed it away with the inside of her jacket. She stuck her mouth under the tap and took a long drink. It did nothing for her thirst or the sandpaper scratching that had been stalking her. The voice prattled away in her mind. She needed alcohol. An image of her father’s corpulent face and red channeled eyes knifed through her mind.
Alcoholism ran in every side of her family. When she and James were first married they both drank and they both did some stupid things.
“Mark.” She shook her head.
Miranda quit drinking about the same time she quit smoking. A few times she crawled childishly back to the bottle. But, that stopped years ago.
She leaned her elbows heavily on the sink. It hadn’t stopped years ago. This fucking case brought it all back. She lasted only two days before having her first drink:
The kids were at soccer with James and she was going over the case files, but her pen had barely moved since she sat down. The image of the glass shards in Jackie Harrison’s eyes was nailed to her brain. Even though she needed the money, taking this case had been a mistake.
A whisper told Miranda to pour a glass of wine, and then another, and another. After the third all she remembered was sitting at the table whimpering, “I don’t drink, I don’t drink.” When James found her later that night she was passed out halfway between the bathroom and kitchen reeking of vomit.
After that, her throat started to burn. The voice became forceful. She could barely refuse it.
Mark shouted from the top of the basement stairs. The power was still out down there and the vacuum guys took all their lights with them. Miranda said she would get some flashlights from the cruiser.
On the way out she walked through the living room where the other three bodies were discovered lain out like garbage-dump dolls. Broderick chewed tox out when they found nothing but alcohol in their blood and made them run the tests twice more. If the victims weren’t on something he wanted evidence that there was someone else in the house.
It pissed Miranda off that he was trying to manipulate the case. She knew there was no one else in the house.
Against the basement wall she and Mark found a wooden altar dedicated to Dithyrambus—he who enters life through a double door—the Greek wine God, Dionysus. The open throat of a goat grinned up at them. It wasn’t just five drunks that killed each other. They were followers of a god that brought insanity as freely as bliss. They had fallen into a maenadic frenzy—divine madness—and…
She didn’t need to think about the rest.
She grabbed three flashlights from Mark’s cruiser and went back inside.
The obliquely hanging basement door had a head-sized hole smashed through it. Miranda could still smell the sweet reek of wine rolling up from down stairs.
Unconsciously, she took a deep breath. Mark and Chris took their flashlights and the three descended.
Even after being cleaned, the smell was so strong it nearly knocked them flat. Miranda basked in it: for the first time since she was drunk the itch in her throat was gone. The whisper inside her said she was about to see something more incredible than the first time she here:
The stairs grated with each step down; the sound was picked up by the basement walls and warped into a screaming echo. As they rounded the corner the stagnant air froze on their skin. The basement was underground; it reminded Miranda of a grave. Mark’s flashlight played across the room and sent caustic shadows, like lines of blood, dancing across the walls. The entire floor seethed. For a second Miranda couldn’t breathe. The three two-hundred-litre casks against the far wall had been smashed open and flooded the room with a lake of wine.
“Wino’s paradise,” Mark said, but it got only a single forced “ha” from Miranda.
Chris came in a few steps behind her.
“Vacuum guys said they found something, a big picture on the floor,” he said.
The voice in Miranda’s head became a cacophony of whispers for drink.
As they rounded the corner she was hit by a memory: a dream she had while drunk:
The wine filled basement wavered in waiting calm. While the noise of revelry echoed from upstairs. Miranda sat on the bottom step, feet in wine, patting a goat on the head. She felt sick knowing what was going to happen. A tall man, glowing divinely, lurched down the stairs behind her. He was statue perfect and had vines of curly hair spilling over his shoulders. In one hand he carried a knife and swigged from bottle in the other. He laughed and sang infectiously. Miranda couldn’t stop a smile. As he reached the bottom step he swallowed the last of the bottle and smashed it. His face cracked in a grin of madness and he tore apart the goat.
Chris pulled her from the memory.
“Oh Christ, that’s so creepy,” he said, flashlight probing the corners of the room.
Mark grimaced in agreement. His light had settled on a tiled mosaic in the center of the floor. Concentric circles of brown and white triangles tornadoed inward to the curling amber tendrils of the sun. In the center was a smiling boyish face with wild hair like vines. Miranda knew whose face it was.
The whispering cacophony stopped with the suddenness of a bullet to the head. For the first time in weeks Miranda’s shoulders relaxed. The mosaic filled her with warmth. She understood now. There was no crime here; Dionysus freed the victims with madness. Their deaths were perfectly natural, and perhaps even divine. She shouldn’t have been investigating them; she should have been praising them. But how could she explain that to Broderick?
“This what we’re looking for?” Mark asked.
Chris shrugged.
“It’s incredible,” Miranda said, and took a long drink from the flask in her pocket.
Ok formatting's a little wierd, but it should be readable.
There had been a tic in her mind since the moment Miranda took the case. It was like having an itch in a place she couldn’t scratch and, over the past week, it had started to whisper to her. It became a voice that was getting hard to ignore.
She cracked another can of Red Bull and leaned against the porch wall. It was as if she was drinking sand. The voice inside her wanted wine, but she wasn’t listening. Instead, she was thinking about how much she wanted to go home, and the bitter wind that poked at her like a coroner at a body.
The scything moon cast speckles of white light on the rural house. Miranda sighed and shifted her weight off the small flask in her back pocket. This porch was becoming home. Half way through her Red Bull she lit a Marlboro—the kind her father used to smoke—and took a heavy drag. So much for not smoking any more. Up until last night, she hadn’t had a cigarette since Morgan was born—and that was nine years ago. But what did it matter? This wasn’t the first time work or troubles with James had driven her back into the arms of a bad habit.
A dark-skinned officer with a crew cut, Mark, came up and leaned against the wall beside her.
“Vacuum guys just left. Basement still reeks but at least it’s dry. When Chris gets here we can go down and take a look,” he said.
Miranda snuffed out her smoke in the Red Bull can and squeezed her temples. Coffee stopped working last night, so she switched to energy drinks and her body was beginning to hate her.
“I don’t think there’s anything left to find. But, I’ll come down,” she said.
Mark began into the house; he turned back.
“Miranda, you look like shit. You going to be ok?”
She nodded and he walked away. Fuck him and his bullshit concern. As if she didn’t have enough stress. It was bad being on the same case as Mark, but she would rather burn off her toes than be alone with him. Once they looked through the basement she could go home and start wrapping this case up—maybe that voice would leave her alone. Had she known Mark was going to be there she never would have taken this case:
“Miranda, it’s Broderick. I can’t get a hold of Simon, there’s a quintuple homicide out near Franklin’s Cross. Do you know where he is?”
She started driving over.
“I’ll take it.”
“No, I need one of the seniors on this one.”
Luckily, Broderick had a weakness for women and Miranda seduced him into giving her the case. By the time she got there the police and forensics crew had already secured the area and started tagging evidence.
How out of place it all seemed: a lonely rural house lit by the stabbing blues and reds of police cars, the forensics team prodding through the lives of the dead. She felt like an invader.
Miranda dropped her empty into the garbage can and went inside. Most of the smell was gone, though faint fingers of the odour of death and wine lingered around the house. It was a metallic taste that provoked the itch in her throat. Though initially choking, the smell had become habitually appealing.
Cleaned up, the house reminded her of her neighbour Martin’s from when she was a kid—a memory of his warm hands and the sweet things he whispered shivered through her. Two weeks ago, the floor was strewn with fragments of glass—green and stained red like a parody of Christmas. The walls were spattered with wide patches of wine and blood. The furniture was as torn as the corpses. Most of this was cleaned up as forensics was done with it, but no one wanted to touch the walls. A shudder ripped up her spine. The whole crime scene still made her stomach jump.
Miranda stepped over the fractured tiles where, after slicing a woman named Jackie Harrison to fleshy ribbons with a broken bottle, Thomas McCormick had brought the refrigerator down on himself.
Again, Miranda wondered why glass? There was a block of knives within arms reach of the fridge and a loaded Remington in the closet.
Broderick insisted it was because the victims were all on PCP or LSD or something.
“People just don’t go nuts like that when they’re drunk,” he said.
Miranda scratched her throat; she didn’t believe him.
Chris came into the kitchen behind her and sputtered.
“Oh god, Miranda, I thought you and Mark would be downstairs.”
She didn’t reply.
“Doesn’t this place remind you of Slaughter House Five?”
“Never seen it,” Miranda muttered. “Reminds me of my old neighbour’s.”
Then Chris noticed her face.
“Jesus Christ, how long have you been here?”
She thought for a second.
“Since yesterday morning.”
“You look dead, you should really go home.”
Miranda nodded, not until she had seen this thing through. The voice wouldn’t let her.
She went into the bathroom and looked in the fragmented mirror. Her throat was raw from scratching and there were bags under her eyes so thick it looked like James had decked her. He might as well have, she was still angry with him:
On the first night of the case, it was nearly dawn when Miranda’s 4Runner pulled into the driveway. The front door was hanging half open. A shock tore through her. Had someone broken in? When she saw James’s shoes kicked into the rose garden her anger rose like the hammer on a pistol. She stamped inside and slammed the door. Her husband groaned and blundered in from the living room rubbing his head.
“I didn’t know you were working late. I didn’t want to wake you so I slept down here,” he said.
“How late were you out?”
James looked down like a berated teenager.
“You irresponsible prick. You left the kids alone. I can’t...” She groped for words but found none. Their kids weren’t even ten yet. As if their marriage didn’t have enough problems.
Miranda splashed some water on her face and—not finding a towel—rubbed it away with the inside of her jacket. She stuck her mouth under the tap and took a long drink. It did nothing for her thirst or the sandpaper scratching that had been stalking her. The voice prattled away in her mind. She needed alcohol. An image of her father’s corpulent face and red channeled eyes knifed through her mind.
Alcoholism ran in every side of her family. When she and James were first married they both drank and they both did some stupid things.
“Mark.” She shook her head.
Miranda quit drinking about the same time she quit smoking. A few times she crawled childishly back to the bottle. But, that stopped years ago.
She leaned her elbows heavily on the sink. It hadn’t stopped years ago. This fucking case brought it all back. She lasted only two days before having her first drink:
The kids were at soccer with James and she was going over the case files, but her pen had barely moved since she sat down. The image of the glass shards in Jackie Harrison’s eyes was nailed to her brain. Even though she needed the money, taking this case had been a mistake.
A whisper told Miranda to pour a glass of wine, and then another, and another. After the third all she remembered was sitting at the table whimpering, “I don’t drink, I don’t drink.” When James found her later that night she was passed out halfway between the bathroom and kitchen reeking of vomit.
After that, her throat started to burn. The voice became forceful. She could barely refuse it.
Mark shouted from the top of the basement stairs. The power was still out down there and the vacuum guys took all their lights with them. Miranda said she would get some flashlights from the cruiser.
On the way out she walked through the living room where the other three bodies were discovered lain out like garbage-dump dolls. Broderick chewed tox out when they found nothing but alcohol in their blood and made them run the tests twice more. If the victims weren’t on something he wanted evidence that there was someone else in the house.
It pissed Miranda off that he was trying to manipulate the case. She knew there was no one else in the house.
Against the basement wall she and Mark found a wooden altar dedicated to Dithyrambus—he who enters life through a double door—the Greek wine God, Dionysus. The open throat of a goat grinned up at them. It wasn’t just five drunks that killed each other. They were followers of a god that brought insanity as freely as bliss. They had fallen into a maenadic frenzy—divine madness—and…
She didn’t need to think about the rest.
She grabbed three flashlights from Mark’s cruiser and went back inside.
The obliquely hanging basement door had a head-sized hole smashed through it. Miranda could still smell the sweet reek of wine rolling up from down stairs.
Unconsciously, she took a deep breath. Mark and Chris took their flashlights and the three descended.
Even after being cleaned, the smell was so strong it nearly knocked them flat. Miranda basked in it: for the first time since she was drunk the itch in her throat was gone. The whisper inside her said she was about to see something more incredible than the first time she here:
The stairs grated with each step down; the sound was picked up by the basement walls and warped into a screaming echo. As they rounded the corner the stagnant air froze on their skin. The basement was underground; it reminded Miranda of a grave. Mark’s flashlight played across the room and sent caustic shadows, like lines of blood, dancing across the walls. The entire floor seethed. For a second Miranda couldn’t breathe. The three two-hundred-litre casks against the far wall had been smashed open and flooded the room with a lake of wine.
“Wino’s paradise,” Mark said, but it got only a single forced “ha” from Miranda.
Chris came in a few steps behind her.
“Vacuum guys said they found something, a big picture on the floor,” he said.
The voice in Miranda’s head became a cacophony of whispers for drink.
As they rounded the corner she was hit by a memory: a dream she had while drunk:
The wine filled basement wavered in waiting calm. While the noise of revelry echoed from upstairs. Miranda sat on the bottom step, feet in wine, patting a goat on the head. She felt sick knowing what was going to happen. A tall man, glowing divinely, lurched down the stairs behind her. He was statue perfect and had vines of curly hair spilling over his shoulders. In one hand he carried a knife and swigged from bottle in the other. He laughed and sang infectiously. Miranda couldn’t stop a smile. As he reached the bottom step he swallowed the last of the bottle and smashed it. His face cracked in a grin of madness and he tore apart the goat.
Chris pulled her from the memory.
“Oh Christ, that’s so creepy,” he said, flashlight probing the corners of the room.
Mark grimaced in agreement. His light had settled on a tiled mosaic in the center of the floor. Concentric circles of brown and white triangles tornadoed inward to the curling amber tendrils of the sun. In the center was a smiling boyish face with wild hair like vines. Miranda knew whose face it was.
The whispering cacophony stopped with the suddenness of a bullet to the head. For the first time in weeks Miranda’s shoulders relaxed. The mosaic filled her with warmth. She understood now. There was no crime here; Dionysus freed the victims with madness. Their deaths were perfectly natural, and perhaps even divine. She shouldn’t have been investigating them; she should have been praising them. But how could she explain that to Broderick?
“This what we’re looking for?” Mark asked.
Chris shrugged.
“It’s incredible,” Miranda said, and took a long drink from the flask in her pocket.